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Fatima Korok has a hell of a story to tell. Born in Hungary, she discovered synchronized swimming at a young age and then focused on her career as a tour guide & manager in Budapest. During that time, she developed a series of unhealthy habits, which took their toll on her health as she became obese. How did freediving prove to be good for her health?
"My decision about why I started freediving was not that simple. After I stopped synchronized swimming when I was 16, I went through the mental challenge of what to do with my free time. So I just started to eat a lot and party, and develop bad habits which I am still struggling with obviously.
I had 8 years of very intense self-destruction while I was a tour guide and manager in Budapest. I was focusing more on my knowledge and career, instead of my happiness and self-awareness. I was believing that I was changing the world by educating people about history and culture while I was basically destroying my own soul.
There were some fun parts, I loved my job, even now I would love to go back home and do a tour. I didn’t have time though for myself and at the time I was getting more and more obese. I don’t remember exactly when I got from overweight to obese, but I realized that I really need to do something when I broke my ankle 5 years ago. It was not healing because I was so obese, and it took me 3 months in bed to recover.
I thought “I’m not traveling anywhere, I’m only drinking, eating, partying, and smoking”, so I was like “I need another passion that can make me happy, mentally & physically”. So, I started to travel. And I was in Israel, and then I went to Tenerife, the Netherlands, in Dubai, and then again to Israel, so I started to really like traveling. I also started to lose weight, I lost my first 20 kg, and I was really on the way to changing myself.
I was scuba diving in Tenerife, and I was like “OMG, scuba diving is gonna be my path” and my instructor was like “oh, you are good at this, you should become an instructor”. So I really believed him because I was looking for something like that, I was looking for guidance. When he told me that, it resonated with me, so, I worked very hard during the next season and I went through very challenging periods.
Long story short, I saved a lot of money and moved to Tenerife. But what I witnessed there was that the scuba community was not like I imagined it. During my first dive there, on the way back home on the boat, some used to be smoking and drinking beer. I was really trying to get rid of all those bad habits because I was quite a heavy smoker. I quit smoking before moving to Tenerife, I was training a lot, I started doing yoga, I was a big fan of interval training at the time, and I was also trying to lose weight. So was like “maybe scuba diving is not the right thing and it can’t keep me on the right way”!
Maybe I hadn’t met the right guys in the community but then there was this Ηungarian friend of mine who mentioned freediving. I was like “wow, so freediving is a thing”! So, the whole idea of me freediving was based on me looking for a passion that can give me a purpose in my life and at the same time be a recovery from my eating disorder and from my bad habits. I wanted to replace those habits with others, which can help me improve and be better".
Fatima is currently the deepest woman in Hungary and #2 in CWTB globally. Way to go.